In the ruined city that had once hosted Hitler's rallies, judges from the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union convened to try the surviving architects of the Third Reich. Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, and eighteen others sat in the dock as prosecutors introduced a legal concept barely tested before: that individuals, including heads of state, could be criminally liable for atrocities committed under color of law. The trial established precedents underpinning modern international criminal law.
The courtroom in Nuremberg's Palace of Justice had been chosen partly because its jail survived Allied bombing largely intact, and partly for its symbolism — this was the city of Nazi Party congresses, the spiritual capital of the movement now facing judgment. When the tribunal gaveled into session on the morning of November 20, 1945, chief American prosecutor Robert H. Jackson delivered an opening statement that reporters called one of the finest legal orations of the century: "The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored."
Göring, once Hitler's designated successor, treated the proceedings with theatrical contempt, smirking through translated testimony and sparring with prosecutors. Rudolf Hess appeared dazed, feigning or suffering genuine amnesia. Over the following ten months, the tribunal would hear testimony describing the machinery of the Holocaust in granular, unbearable detail — camp commandants, gas chamber logs, mountains of confiscated property.
The trial was not without controversy: the Soviet judges themselves represented a regime guilty of mass atrocities, and critics called the whole affair victor's justice. Yet the Nuremberg principles — that following orders is no defense, that aggressive war is itself a crime — became foundational to the United Nations Charter and, decades later, to the International Criminal Court.